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symbolset writes "The first Aakash tablet proposed for India schools has failed. Datawind managed to deliver the $45 Android tablet as reported here previously, but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold. Facing a loss in revenue it's turning into a disaster for the small Canadian company as they are now proving unable to deliver both the Aakash tablet and the parallel retail product. Senior executives have begun to flee. The company has presold a great many tablets, and delivery failure reports are beginning to mount. Is this the Phantom console of this decade?"

You clearly haven't done business in India. "Manufacture the product" is where things went off the rails here, even as stated by the summary: "but suffering a breach in faith by both their contract manufacturer and the accepting agency in India had to put the project on hold." Corruption is most often found in the implementation phase of things, because at that point you're committed to the bridge/road/product/building/whatever and the person demanding a bribe understands this. It's far easier to simply

Answer? Make it in China and don't tell them about any deals! From the looks of it it was the Indian government with its head up its ass, it kept changing the specs with finally asking for specs similar to USA milspec (which as anybody knows costs thousands per unit because of how much abuse they can take. They ARE built for the battlefield after all) while still expecting them to keep the price low enough you could practically give them away...ohh AND they wanted double the battery AND a doubling of speed on the CPU! Hell why not ask for a pony to bring the stars of the last porn convention to blow you while you are at it?

The moral of this story is FUCK THE GOVERNMENTS and instead simply make as good a product as you can to fit a price point. if this guy can crank out sub $80 pads that are actually pleasant to use? Then he WILL find a market for them. Hell if it'll play SD video at whatever resolution the screen is I'll take 4 please. But by dealing with governments unless you are a "good old boy" that knows their games and whom to slip the envelope of money to you aren't gonna win friend, that is just the way it is.

When the customer starts changing the contract, the proper answer is always "No". It's tempting to think that they can only change their minds once. They can change their minds over and over until you get driven out of business, especially if they think they can buy your product directly from the manufacturer, which is now a local company. If your only contribution is capital and an idea, you've made yourself irrelevant once the product hits the production stage. Especially if the buyer and the manufacturer

What? Google had nothing to do with this failure other than making the OS. Just because they make Android doesn't mean they are responsible for every android device that is made. That is like saying Microsoft is at fault if the motherboard of your new computer fails.

So technically, it's the Android phone which is really popular. I suppose it doesn't hurt that there are a bazillion different staged versions of Android out there on all sorts of devices, versus ~5 versions of iOS on a very limited range of products.

Also, as MacOS is still ~27% behind Windows as the most popular OS, and only 7% above Linux OS popularity, they really aren't as ubiquitous as people make them seem. There is a lot of hype, but significantly less actual progress for the OS/equipment beyond standard-use consumers.

Hard to say who's a shill and who's just trolling these days. Whatever this one's motivation, between shills and trolls, they've just about managed to kill Slashdot as a worthwhile site to discuss interesting topics.

In this instance, the shills probably had good motivation to prevent open discussion. Datawind may have succeeded in making a cheap tablet, but they were by no means the only one. Indian (and other buyers) are spoilt for choice at the bottom of the market, with dozens of vendors selling table

I finally gave up supporting my Mom's old Vista computer (marginal hardware) and installed Ubuntu. Everything works great (including sound and WiFi) with standard install. Performance is snappy. I can also support here using Remote Desktop (not needed so far).

Wtf does Google have anything to do with manufacturing and government requirements issues? Android is software, all the problem are hardware. If you are gonna blindly bash Google, at least keep it relevant unless this is an attempt to troll.

For those of you who are to lazy to RTFA.

1) Government wants $45 laptop to have military grade ruggedness (of which was not stated until late into the game). Quote from the article, ' The criteria included being able to withstand four inches of rain, enduring shock tests when “mounted in a vehicle,” and when subject to “sudden acceleration, braking, or turning while transporting the units.” ' Normally I wouldn't consider this that bad but for a $45 laptop, I can definitely see an issue.

2) The manufacturer "signed an agreement with I.I.T. Rajasthan to manufacture what Mr. Tuli said he believes is a rival low-cost tablet." This side seems to be a mess of Corporate political issues. You can read the article for more on this yourself.

If you don't know why this is +5 Insightful and +5 Informative, then you completely validated the entire point of this post.

Learn when "citation needed" is appropriate for use. Here's a hint, when you use in inappropriate places, such as here or in other less formal circles, you sound like a complete fucking idiot because you're demanding information but are too stupid and/or lazy to realize your means of prompting additional information is completely inappropriate. Furthermore, "citation need

It can't, not anymore. Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it. And while your experience may vary I had a HELL of a lot bigger time with crashing X Server than I ever did with BSODs. it especially didn't seem to like having a video playing while surfing to pages that may have an embedded video or surfing pages with possible embedded video while playing tunes in the background. Hell Firefox won't allow hardware acceleration in Linux because X Drivers are buggy [osnews.com] and they don't want to be blamed for X crashes.

As for TFA it has nothing to do with Android and everything to do with shitty governments wanting a pie in the sky. A $45 tablet and they want milspec? yeah and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed, while certain things ARE inflated one thing that isn't is how damned expensive it is to make electronics that can take milspec abuse. The reason a toughbook is so damned expensive is because of the amount of abuse it can take and you just can't get the materials to absorb that much punishment for $50, just not gonna happen. And they want double battery life and double CPU for the same price? Again the reason the price was so low was precisely BECAUSE it was using chips not in high demand such as its ARM 11 366MHz CPU. You want something that is going in more high dollar cell phones you have to pay a more high dollar price, that's reality. What it sounds like they are wanting is a milspec iPad for $50 and are using that as an excuse to give one of their buddies the contract who will of course probably come out with something worse than what this guy is offering so they can pocket more profit after bribing officials.

"and I want my Alyson Hannigan sexbot for $50 and a pack of Lucky Strikes and now we're both disappointed"

Too greedy. I'd be willing to forego the cigarettes.

Not so! A well-known result of using the Alyson Hannigan sexbot is the uncontrollable need to light one up and sigh contentedly afterward. If you don't include the smokes, it becomes a hidden tax on Alyson Hannigan sexbots.

I got into a nasty situation with Vista where it would crash on startup due to some driver and instead of giving me useful information it simply immediately restarted Windows and I got stuck in a loop. I think this was an exception to the rule though - I have hardly ever seen any serious crashes on Windows in the post-Vista (and even in the late-Vista) era. It's pretty stable now, even in the presence of crash-prone drivers.

Its damned near impossible to BSOD a Windows 7 system with a bad driver, it will just silently kill and restart the driver (as a system should) and make a little note in Action Center about it.

Is there any online documentation on this feature where the OS can silently kill and restart the driver? I can't find any references to that other than for "VPU Recover", which is supported as far back as Windows XP.

I have recently been configuring a webserver running Windows Server 2008 R2 [wikimedia.org], which uses the same kerne

Did you go to Windows answers [microsoft.com] and submit a minidump? While I would assume that if you are running 2K8 you would have a support contract and thus be able to open a ticket even if you do not have a contract you can go here and tell them your problem and after submitting a minidump they will often escalate it within MSFT and get you a patch if its a Windows problem. I had this done myself when I found a weird little bug with WMP 12 where it would refuse to downconvert a WMA file from one bitrate to a lower bit

I shouldn't answer an AC but since I actually know the answer to that one WTF I'll go ahead. the reason a certain ATI driver shits itself on Windows is a royally fucked.NET update put out by MSFT. It doesn't seem to affect other software but the ATI driver expects.NET to behave a certain way and when that update is applied it don't so ur fucked.

The way to fix this is with Revo Uninstaller since MSFT thinks.NET is so damned wonderful they never bothered coming up with a way to cleanly uninstall the bitch. remove ALL patches related to.NET followed by.NET itself and then install the latest version ONLY, don't take some old version and patch up to current. Finally remove and re-install the ATI driver and it will behave itself. Even better once you have removed.NET install the latest AMD driver (unless you are stuck with some legacy cards, then follow the first suggestion) which thankfully they removed all the.NET dependencies and went with Visual C++ instead.

But this is a classic example of what happens when a company bases a core component of one of their major pieces of software on something they have ZERO control over. I only hope the moron that decided to base the drivers on.NET of all things got himself a pink slip when they were bought by AMD because that was a seriously dumbass move.

Actually the description is a lot larger and more complex than the actual action, which is

1.- Go to Ninite [ninite.com] check box for revo and run it, while open go ahead and do same with ATI driver 2.-Pick.NET from list and uninstall it, 3.-Download latest.NET and run it. 4.-Download latest AMD driver and run it

And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default se

<statement type="worldview" style="amusing>And unlike Linux this is 100% GUI, no having to tweak CLI gobbledygook which is usually the case. Hell you can even send screen caps and your average grandma could do this one since revo is left at default settings. This is why I have said for years if Linux wishes to go anywhere CLI HAS TO BE BANNED because otherwise lazy devs use it as a crutch.</statement>

There won't be any flamewars because as it says in my sig I ignore ACs and most of the FOSSies here only post as ACs since they have their regular accounts modded to hell because of batshit conspiracy posts. They also have no comeback to one simple fact, ALL OSes USED to be CLIs and now they are not, why? Because GUIs are explorable and discoverable, CLI is not. Do you use CLI with an iPhone? Android? No? Why? Because its a crappy human interface that's why. But as long as those that have drank the koolaid

I don't know what town you live in (or who is paying you to live there), but to most people, Google and Android stand for options. If you want to save money, you can get a cheap Android device. If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device. You can put whatever you want on your own device. And I don't think any reasonable person would expect a $45 Android tablet to have the same capabilities or quality as an iPad, and it doesn't need to if you look at what it's designed for: to make technology available in a non-1st world state.

Of course, the nature of your post and the fact that your ID is almost as high as the National Debt show you are nothing more than a paid (at least I hope you are at least getting paid) astroturfer trying to make Google look bad. The truth is that Google is nowhere near the "bad joke around town". People like you are, though. Subtlety, try it.

> If you want to pay for quality, you can get a quality Android device.

It is more like: if you pay for quality, you *may* get a quality Android device, but you wont know until much later. Some manufacturers promise support and upgrades, but never deliver. In fact none of the Android manufacturers delivers consistently decent (not even outstanding) support.

At $45 they were basically looking at an ereader with wifi and the ability to run some limited programs. DataWind did deliver a design that could be made and delivered at that cost, and the second generation was even better. This could have been awesome. The price point is important because India needs about a half-billion of these tablets to provide one to each student over the next decade. They have devised a k-12 curriculum to put on it.

Breach of faith means that somebody failed to meet their commitments. That can mean that they signed up to do things that they later found out were harder than they thought. That's incompetence. Or more often it means that they knew they wouldn't come through and took your money anyway.

The fact that they were paid in advance for hardware tells me it's more likely corruption/fraud than plain incompetence, but often you get the incompetence rolled into a fraudulent deal.

That may be true, but in my experience business deals require a little trust. If you think you can make a deal with untrustworthy people but protect yourself with contracts, you're naive. When you take the other guy to court because he stabbed you in the back, no result you can hope for beats never having dealt with him in the first place.

These kinds of international business deals that involve technology and design know-how transfers are especially tricky. If your overseas partner suddenly realizes that h

The phrase 3rd world has nothing to do with standards or wealth and India is a 3rd world country, I believe.

That being said, I do not know about bribes, but I have been involved in projects where part of the team was outsourced in India and you often get what you paid for with outsourcing from what I have seen.

No, everyone we paid for at the very least seemed technically qualified for the job.The problem was that several other companies were also paying them to work full time for them.We found out, and one thing lead to another and they withheld all the work they had done on the project thus far.

turns into a bunch of imaginary billing by people with fake degrees and no experience and no communication so it ends up costing more and barely working but when you fire them you discover that the code is a twisty piece of crap with WTFs everywhere and it would be easier to start over from scratch.

The term Third World arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World), or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World). This definition provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the earth into three groups based on social, political, and economic divisions.

Either you raise the price of the finished product and make the customer pay for the inefficiency, or you claim a business loss, and use tax loopholes to make the government pay for the inefficiency.If that all fails, you can fire enough low-level employees to cover the inefficiency. and if THAT fails, you max out the corporate loans, write yourself a nice fat severance check, and disappear into South America.

People seem to be surprised that Akash tablets are turning out to be failures.The cost factor was a big lie and so it will be revised.There are tablets available for $70-$75 range.Take a look at olivepad v-tr200 specs.You will be surprised that its there and shipping.Not that it ought to be good...but cost reduction is possible.

From what I can tell, they got the tender, did all the groundwork, then the group they were collaborating with came out with new impossible to achieve specs, backed up by the government, and their subcontractor wandered off to create a competing product.

Sadly this kind of thing is all too common in India. A friend of mine was fool enough to believe it when he was promised all kinds of percentages and payments "in the future" if he'd help arrange investors for a project in India. He did his work, he made the contacts, and now most of the participants have signed on to side deals that don't pay him anything.

We warned him it was too good to be true. I'm sure people warned those who got into this $45 tablet debacle, too. But some people won't listen to

Well hopefully it doesn't ruin any of the well meaning guys that tried to make this happen, dollar signs aren't usually stacked too deeply around $45 tablets! With any luck they can call it lesson learned and get on with their lives the wiser for it.

This project needs to die, and die fast. It doesn't matter just how it happens, it's a colossal waste of money. Datawind were trying to sell awful junk for more than it costs to just buy a bit less awful junk from China. The Indian government department concerned is clueless about technology, from the minister all the way down.

The linked tablets have the exact same specs as the indian one mentioned in this story. So if you're going to diss the specs, you can start right with that one. And no, you don't run an old GNU/Linux distribution on these tablets, you run a tailored version of Android. Which runs pretty well with 256 MB of RAM.

A 1GHz PIII with 512MB of RAM takes nearly 3 minutes to boot and load to the point of being able to browse with Firefox with Ubuntu or Windows XP. Without hardware acceleration, the box is incapable of displaying video any faster than 4-5 frames per second when full-screened.

It takes a minute or two to load an office suite to edit a document.

Just because it used to be my primary work machine when I bought it does not mean that software bloat has made it useless

Unlike eBay the Aliexpress system shows buyer feedback for each item publicly, so you can see that on both tablets that I have linked they have hundreds of positive "excellent", "5 star" feedback from people.

`In rich countries, we call corruption "government" and it's less visible due to being in cahoots with the people who also own the media.`

in rich countries, the rich manipulate the people into hating the government so that the corrupt wealthy can wire their money anywhere while the media cohorts make it look like the 'corruption' is just as bad as anywhere else. oh sure they'll mention the caymans or ireland or wherever when they really need to, but they al

Corruption? I didn't see any mention of it in either the two-part New York Times piece or the article linked from India's Economic Times. Or is it automatically assumed that when a project of this nature fails in India corruption has to be the cause?

My Transformer TF101 at $400 is really nice. It has ICS, and you can buy them now for $350 even though there's a new model out that has quad core. The iPad2 can be had for $350 as an Apple refurb. But those are 10" tablets, and the one we're talking about is half that size.

They don't need to make a ton of money on each one. India was looking to buy a half-billion of these tablets. And the maker would get to have the brand recognition as provider of tablets to all the students in India - and so sell th